Daniel Turner

Reinjecting meaning

In his Notes on Cinematography, Robert Bresson wrote that there is "no art without transformation". This is a credo that Daniel Turner could make his own, since his process has consistently included along the years acts of transmutation, displacement, dislocation and dissolution. These operations draw from a wide repertory of gestures and rituals, hinting at conversions as the underlying common denominator of his art. Most of the objects thus renegotiated through his hands bear witness to a specific story. Their own tale, sometimes inextricably tied to a complex transfiguration or to a simpler process of decontextualisation. But they also testify to the artist's journey, inciting him to collect pieces of furniture that remind him one way or another of previous chapters of his existence. Reclaiming them enables him to hold onto a memory, while imparting their substance with an unprecedented sense of presence. Present and past overlap ceaselessly. These two temporalities are never still, as the artist strives to entangle them even further through various degrees of object metamorphosis, sometimes intervening himself directly in situ. These artefacts are made all the more elusive by the fact that they belong to a standardised, industrial and ready-made universe, devoid of warmth, almost clinical; at first glance, they seem affectless, enabling nothing to transpire of their autobiographical resonance. It is the case with the burnishes on wooden panels produced with stainless steel wool applied by hand. As evanescent as they are informal, the subtle chromatic traces composing blurred masses with erratic outlines betray nothing of the repurposed material's true genealogy. And yet, this steel wool was produced out of metallic chairs gleaned from an American psychiatric institution. A way of reinjecting meaning, all the while retaining a sense of reserve, in materials that wouldn't be suspected of harbouring such energy.

- Erik Verhagen
Translated from French by Noam Assayag